It’s with great pleasure that we can finally say: Diceheart is now available for purchase on Steam!
If our recent tweets are any indication, we’re getting a little sentimental. This is the culmination of over 2 years of non-stop work for us, and I’m so proud of what we’ve accomplished. What started as something we’d try and bash out in a month or two and have some fun with has turned into a very real, very big game, and one I sincerely believe is a blast to play.
Massive thank you to everyone who helped us get this far and put up with us over the last few years, it means a great deal to us. Special shout-out to RoboticBattleToaster, whose streams of Diceheart gave us an indispensable morale boost for the final couple of weeks of development, as well as every other content creator who gave us coverage recently. Seeing someone play the game outside our circle of testers and have fun with it has been seriously overwhelming. We hope you enjoy Diceheart as much we all do!
As per usual, here are all the changes we’ve made since the last log – and there’s a couple pretty big ones. All this will be in the version you play on Steam, so look forward to it! If you find any bugs, please let us know on our feedback page.
Oh, and by the way, we’ve updated the wiki, so it’s now up-to-date with the release version.
Burn and wither 2.0
One of the more complicated mechanics to get your head around has always been the debuffs. In particular, knowing how much extra damage you’d get from burn or the penalty you’d get from wither felt somewhat arbitrary. Earlier in the year, we altered several tricks to get away from nasty percent-based calculations, but burn and wither stuck around with an awkward 25% modifier.
But no more. Burn and wither now apply their bonus damage and damage penalty respectively by basing them on complete stacks – this refers to a character’s stack being a multiple of their resistance. This concept may be familiar to you, as it’s used in both freeze and poison, as well as a ton of tricks and gambits.
This simple change makes it far more intuitive to tell exactly what’s going to happen with your dice when you attack with them while affected by those debuffs – simply look at how many complete stacks there are, and boom: that’s the burn damage, or the wither penalty. No more “what’s 25% of 7 going to be rounded to?”
It’s also had the lovely side-effect of buffing wither, which always felt like it lagged behind the other debuffs in terms of its usefulness. It’s now a more-than-worthy contender with freeze as an incredible defensive debuff, and adds an extra layer of depth to playing Lief due to the significant increase in wither penalties across the board.
A couple of tricks have been altered to account for these adjustments, but overall, unless you’d memorised the somewhat arbitrary ranges for burn and wither in the previous system, the change is surprisingly subtle, and we’re hoping it’ll make debuffs click quicker with new players.
If you want to read up on the elements system, check out the wiki, which has been updated to reflect these changes.
Holy adjustments
We noticed that the holy buff was, frankly, insanely overpowered – and not in a fun way. The problem was with the end-of-round damage infliction, which was based off your remaining block. Because holy mode doubled the block you got from dice, the most viable strategy with it was to simply activate holy, block with everything, then sit back and watch every enemy on the screen eat an obscene amount of damage. Because of this, holy was actually a better damage-dealer than necro – you know, the damage-dealing power up. Worst of all, this was entirely non-interactive gameplay, and more than a little smooth-brained.
Instead, we decided to refocus holy on its defensive capabilities, which is what it was meant to be about in the first place. Instead of the round-end damage being based off your block, it’s now based off the amount of health you recover while the power is active. Nothing else about it has changed; you still get healing from holy/normal dice, you still get extra block and resistance, but now, the damage is a nice little bonus on top of that, while still having the potential for crazy plays if the situation is right.
To keep track of the amount you healed, we added a tracker to the left of the gauge when you’re in holy mode. A nifty aspect to this is that it will track healing you receive from any source, not just holy/normal dice, so if you play your cards correctly, you should be able to get creative with this new mechanic.
If you want to learn more about holy, check out the wiki.
Other changes
Minor
- Gave a +1 modifier to bosses’ random D4 reward option
- Adjusted mixing of treasure music
- Adjusted map generation of most levels
- Updated blood fountain enemy outlines
- Synced BOREAS death SFX
- Updates to skinning outlines
- Updates to Bakinnenegg and Ghost Pepper death animations
- Foot Soldier got a nice modifier
- Sentinels now play boss music
- Added end turn (E) and auto attack (Q) hotkeys
- Music rebalancing (thanks Patrik)
- Updated some trick icons
- Added Nuclear Nile Nation level music
- Updated some enemies’ conditional movesets in later levels
- Updated every bit of text in the game
- Improved text styling in hints and tooltips
- Added some more Gambit Lad animations
- Added some more command protection
- Added decorations to the fountain front
- Minor background updates
- Add fountain and blood fountain SFX
- Added gambit lab SFX and VFX
- Updated anvil strike effect
- Other minor VFX updates
- Singularity level music
- Final boss death SFX
- Made soundwave far less random
- Minor alterations to enemy movesets in later levels
- Improved blending between damage and death animations
Tricks
- Score Counter now counts as poison debuff damage and bypasses block
- Exsanguinate, Score Counter, and Toxic Relationship now proc Already Dead
- Immunosuppressant and Deinsulator should now work on boss mobs
- Immunosuppressant now procs when an enemy takes poison debuff damage, not when the debuff clears, making it more in line with Deinsulator’s proc rate
- Violet Rot now prevents poison stack from reducing on hit, so it can trigger over multiple rounds
- Removed Violet Rot overcharge to counterbalance the duration buff
- Prevent Quantum Stabiliser destroying the Superposition die
- Shapechanger now targets your lowest value dice
- Several characters had certain upgrade values set to 0 for some reason, now corrected
- Included info about freeze order in tips/tooltips
- Split stack/resistance tooltip message into basic/advanced
- Made Stunning Strike not proc off burn damage and adjusted its RNG
- Adjust individual Schadenfreude indicators and make man one show correct number
- Wireless Controller now procs when you start your turn with a debuff, and added an indicator
- Sneak Attack now removes frozen block indicator
- Harder prereqs for Straight
- Improved Wafer Shield’s effect
- Improved Radioactive Lamp’s effect
- Improved Funky Fungi’s effect
- Improved Crabby Mitre’s effect
Fixes
- Fixed cursed resistances persisting after Necro MaDjinn is defeated
- Fixed modifier changes not being represented in the freeze block prediction
- Fixed music issues
- Fixed level transition music doubling up
- Fixed restart run music breaking sometimes
- Fixed enemy auto attack not considering Taunt
- Fixed gambits breaking if dice are socketed and a different action is taken
- Fixed overfilling holy/necro bar
- Fixed Ghost Pepper dice not fading out on death
- Fixed ACACIA dice VFX playing to often
- Fixed fountain playing SFX multiple times if mashed
- Fixed holy not having an impact FX
- Fixed a minor visual glitch in the boss reward
- Fixed incoming damage prediction not updating the tooltip correctly
- Fixed some score issues
- Fixed gambit upgrade error
- Fixed anvil animation
- Fixed bleedover for manual trick outlines
- Fixed seams in map tiles
- Fixed Chestnut ability message in encyclopedia
- Fixed advanced tooltips sticking after moving your cursor off
- Fixed toggle show hints becoming out of sync
- Fixed transient dice breaking the flee system if selected
- Fixed having dice selected making gambits unusable
- Potential fix to debuff tooltips showing in the map health display
- Super Kuraokami boss trick description now shows updated effect
- Fixed Horrific Necktie not triggering/triggering too much
- Fixed Deacrustacean’s idle animation being delayed
- Fixed last battle on level trick reward to exclude elites/bounties
- Fixed Obligatory Thorns only triggering on one attack per enemy
- Fixed a potential double-registered event in Superposition
- Fixed Slash and Slash-derived gambits saying ‘leftmost’ instead of ‘rightmost’
- Fixed freeze damage prediction
- Fixed One With the World player stack prediction
The end…?
It’s been a long journey, and we’re beyond excited to finally be able to share Diceheart with a wider audience. However, our work isn’t done just yet: we can officially confirm that we’ll continue supporting the game with additional free content patches for a good while after release!
We have a few locked-in features planned:
- 100+ new tricks
- More combo gambits to fill in the blanks
- A way to exchange your unused gambits
- Character intros and outros
- A very secret boss
- Level fluctuations/curses
- More intelligent enemy movesets
- Innumerable quality of life updates
- And much more!
This is, of course, in addition to ongoing balance tweaks and bug fixes.
At risk of sounding like a broken record: thanks so much for supporting Diceheart. We’ll speak to you soon.
